Candle Connection

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Infantry unit gets unexpected holiday gift.

Last year a customer purchased a 6-month subscription to Candle of the Month Club. He was treating himself to an economical indulgence and one that would give him 2 candles of different scents each month. The order had a delivery address which looked a bit unusual. As always, the online USPS database was consulted in an attempt to verify the accuracy of the address. When the query returned a message indicating that the address may be undeliverable, contacting the customer was the next step. A call to his cell phone was answered on the second ring and the reception was amazingly clear. He assured me that the delivery address was correct and that he received mail there on a regular basis. The email address provided on the order seemed to indicate that he was a member of the military currently stationed in Iraq. When asked about this, he said that his tour of duty was for an entire year. This prompted me to inquire how many other individuals were in his company. I thanked him for his order and, more importantly, for his service to our country.

A few weeks later, on October 1st, a box containing 16 Hollyberry & Balsam votive candles and 4 Pumpkin Spice votives, each nestled in its own votive holder, was carefully packed and shipped. A brief note was included to our customer and instructed him to give one votive to each person in his company. Naturally, one of the votives was for him. It was our hope that lighting the votive would bring back fond memories of holidays past and bring a bit of comfort to an otherwise stressful tour of duty.

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A lesson from a coworker that changed my life.

Back in the late 1980s I worked with a single middle-aged woman in Honolulu who had moved there from Brockton, Massachusetts the previous year with no safety net or plan other than “to follow my bliss.” Amazingly, Mary Lou enjoyed a smooth transition despite widespread prejudice against women and mainlanders by employers in Hawaii. I have heard it said that the people and experiences you encounter in life forever change you. In some indefinable way, I suspect being exposed to Mary Lou’s positive experience played a part in my own decision years later to realize a life-long dream of owning a candle store by creating a retail website specializing in candles.

Having previously learned HTML in order to create personal web sites for myself and others, I was able to put together the first incarnation of wicksworks.com on a shoestring. If you could go back in time to view it, the website would be hardly recognizable both in appearance and product content. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of this undertaking was finding suppliers. Before Google, searching the Internet was very unfriendly and tedious. But I was on a mission and eventually tracked down a small group of candle manufacturers willing to do business with a newbie.

During my campaign to find candle suppliers, I serendipitously learned of an opportunity to become a distributor for a then-relatively new company that dealt exclusively in highly scented candles made from natural waxes. The downside of this venture was that I wouldn’t be allowed to sell their candles online (that is no longer the case), so I initially passed on it because that did not fit my business model. But the idea captured my attention and I kept being pulled back to it.

Eventually my interest was piqued to the extent that I sought out a distributor and bought a candle. I was so impressed by the strong-smelling, clean-burning candle I received that I decided to become a distributor even though I didn’t have a clear idea at the time how I would market them. With that decision my candle business expanded beyond the virtual realm and gained the potential of building a profitable network of fellow distributors.

In case you’re wondering about it, I am not trying to be coy by not mentioning the name of these candles. Although they are quite well known, I am restrained by the company from using their name online as a quality control measure. However, I can tell you their initials are M.B., the English translation of their name from Italian is My Beautiful, and you can satisfy your curiosity and even buy some by visiting my independent distributor website.

All in all, my adventure has worked out well. It is my hope to pay Mary Lou’s lesson forward by encouraging you to follow your bliss as well.

Visit WicksWorks Candle Emporium or Easy Fun Home Based Candle Business

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The saga of our online and offline candle stores.

For the first two years of wicksworks.com’s existence it offered a fairly limited candle selection, and all orders it received were fulfilled elsewhere. In 2003 we opened WicksWorks Candle Emporium, a conventional retail candle store located in Coos Bay, Oregon. Since we were also a distributor for M.B.’s gourmet candles, one feature of this development was that it gave us a unique venue for selling them and for developing new members for our team of distributors.

We had to expand our offerings and keep a substantial inventory on hand for the physical candle store, and one day we had the revelation that our new candle store could be utilized as a warehouse for wicksworks.com. It wasn’t long before we began selling most of the candles we kept in stock at the online store as well.

Having a conventional candle store impacted wicksworks.com in more subtle ways, too. We began to translate lessons we learned about ergonomics, product display and promotions offline to our online candle store. Many hours were spent redesigning the website to make it as easy as possible to navigate, with like products consolidated in natural groupings. In-store customer requests and feedback prompted us to add products that we had never even considered before, and to understand what people really want as opposed to what we think they want. Our popular buy-four-get-one-free promotions were first introduced at WicksWorks Candle Emporium.

Although we still maintain our wicksworks.com domain name for continuity and to make it easy for customers to remember and type, WicksWorks Candle Emporium is our company name now. The logo we commissioned for the physical candle store has replaced our old wicksworks.com banner, although for obvious reasons it has been modified by deleting our slogan The Best Smelling Store in Coos County.

Visit WicksWorks Candle Emporium or Easy Fun Home Based Candle Business

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